A Long Lost Arthur Russell Interview

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Echo Beach
Melody Maker // April 11, 1987
By: Frank Owen

SIDEBAR: You may know Arthur Russell for his World Of Echo album. Then again, you may remember Dinosaur L or The Necessaries. Frank Owen takes us on a trip of cross fertilization and explains the appeal of the vernacular.

Lesson One: Before approaching the avant-garde, watch where you're putting your feet.

Within minutes of meeting Arthur Russell, disco stylist, cellist and avant-garde composer, I've closeted myself in the toilet of his East Village pad, trying to surreptitiously remove the remains of the doggy doo, a present from the streets of Alphabet City.

Look at me desperately trying to avoid messing up Arthur's carpet. Look at Arthur, paranoid and suspicious, convinced I've traveled 3,000 miles to stitch him up, contorting himself in the next room at the imminent horror of being interviewed by someone he thinks massively misinterpreted the contents of our last chat.

Arthur is plainly ill at ease, all the more so when I jokingly comment on the two cents CBS royalty cheque (part payment for a track called "That Hat" written for Peter Gordon of Love Of Life Orchestra fame, on his last album "Innocent"). Ooops!

What do I think of his new album, the magnificent "World Of Echo"? Do I think his voice is any good? How do I intend to transcribe the tape of our interview? But most of all, what has Will Socolov, co-founder of Sleeping Bag Records along with Arthur, been saying about him?

Arthur's main paranoia point was obviously my friendship with Will Socolov. Will had made no secret of his annoyance with Arthur over allowing Bob and Lola Blank, husband and wife producer and singer respectively, to be involved on Russell'ss latest dance track, "Wax The Van". Will has little respect for either Bob Blank's business or production skills or Lola Blank's singing abilities and as a consequence, Russell's long association with Sleeping Bag has been severed, at least temporarily. And it looks like Will's misgivings were well founded. Despite writing the lyrics, music and producing the track, Russell is credited on the record as being merely the keyboardist, along with Bob Blank's nine-year old kid, Kenny Blank.

Arthur shouldn't worry about Will, though. Socolov's not out for blood but talks of his former partner with exasperation and affection mixed equally.

Lesson Two: when interviewing Arthur Russell think fishy, and if you don't think fishy, think wet.

On the wall of Arthur Russell's bathroom there's a photo of a tropical fish which reads: ?g in the gentle undersea rhythms of a coral reef, the Blue Tang displays his dreamy colouration. Not a bad description of "World Of Echo", I muse, considering much of that album sounds like it was recorded underwater.

In the main room a tropical fish tank nestles in the corner and a picture of a surfacing whale rests on the mantlepiece. Which serves to remind me that water and thebeasts that dwell within are motifs that recur throughout Russell's work. His last Sleeping Bag single went under the name Indian Ocean. Another Sleeping Bag single, "You Can't Hold Me Down", under the name Felix, gives writing credits to Killer Whale, another pseudonym for Russell. And the music publishers on that song are listed as Beach House Music.

Arthur: There's something about water that does it to me. I have to live near water. I couldn't live in the centre of the continent. I go to see the Hudson River nearly every day.
Later on, Arthur comments how he dislikes the dryness of contemporary dancefloor productions (i.e. their lack of echo). Dryness is not something that afflicts Russell's work.

Back at the beginning of the interview, Russell turns his acne-scarred cheek away from the light source and talks between lengthy pauses, his voice sometimes dropping sotto voce and tailing off; non-sequiturs and infuriating tangents litter the interview. But when it comes, it's well worth the trouble.

THE CRAZY WORLD OF ARTHUR RUSSELL

Think of a year, any year.

How about 1974, the year that Television first played CBGB's? In 1974, Arthur Russell was peddling a folk country act at a New York restaurant called Sobossek's. Sometimes using cello and vocals, but mainly guitar and vocals, Russell performed his own compositions like "Ballad Of The Lights Parts 1, 2 and 3", as well as traditional folk stuff like "Aunt Dinah's Quilting Party" and cowboy songs like "Goodbye Old Paint".

Arthur: A lot of people weren't there to see me. They were just there to have dinner. So I used to tell jokes to liven things up. Sometimes it wasn't too funny but it would really pick up when I got drunk. I had one song called "The Ballad Of The Lights, Part Three" and in the middle of the song I would say "Wait a minute" and I go off stage and change into a pair of overalls. That used to go down well. I think comedy is the highest form of art."

Or what about 1981, the year of the New York Noise Festival, at White Columns Art Gallery with PiL, DNA, Live Skull, Glenn Branca etc. In 1981, Arthur Russell was moonlighting as the keyboardist in a wistful, urban folk group called The Necessaries who were strongly akin to The Urban Verbs. Imagine a Metropolitan Neil Young and you've got the idea. Russell also appeared in a solo capacity with a track called "Face Of Helen"; a washed out, wide open synthesized soundscape; on a Crepuscule compilation called "Fruit Of The Original Sin".

Let's look at 1975, the year that Eno discovered ambient music. In 1975, Arthur Russell went into the fashion business: "I needed some money so I bought up 300 used t-shirts. I really liked used clothing which is a very sort of east Village thing. So I went out on the streets and sold these used t-shirts at 50 cents a piece. It wasn't very successful. I think I was ahead of my time because a few years later all the boutiques round here were selling the same thing only much more expensive."

And then there's 1982, the year that Lauri Anderson got to Number One in Britain with "O Superman". In 1982, Arthur Russell and Will Socolov founded Sleeping Bag Records whose first release was "Go Bang Number 5", by Russell under the name Dinosaur L, a segment from an album called "24-24 Music" a fluid constantly shifting piece of music that's intensely danceable and spacially disorientating at the same time. The B-side of "Go Bang" featured avant-garde saxophonist Peter Gordon and two acrobat-cum-rappers called Andre and Abel from the Big Apple Circus which Gordon which Gordon wrote music for at the time.

And what about 1976, the year in which Philip Glass's first opera, "Einstein On The Beach", was premiered at New York'ss Metropolitan Opera House and the most visible example yet of avant-garde composition crossing over to a pop crowd? In 1976, Arthur Russell was drumming for Laurie Anderson. 1976 was also the year he nearly became the fourth member of Talking Heads: "When they started out, they were just a trio and they were looking for a fourth member. We became friends but I ended up not joining the band. They were all from art school and into looking severe and cool. I was never into that. I was from music and I had long hair at the time. I think I maybe had a strong influence on one Talking Heads song, "I Zimbra" on Life During Wartime. On that same album there's a line "This ain't no disco which, at the time, I took as david saying "Disco sucks". I took that very personally."

Here comes 1977, the year in which Peter Gordon founded the Love Of Life Orchestra.

In 1977 Arthur Russell recorded his first record, "Kiss Me Again", on Sire, under the name Dinosaur featuring David Byrne on guitar, even at this stage (as opposed to Dinosaur L) Russell's passion for extended groove formats was well in evidence, the single clocking in at 18 minutes. An ecstatic, out of control slice of disco that features Russell's marvelously jokey cello and probably the most conventional song format he's ever been involved with.

Forward to 1986, and the year that Philip Glass was commissioned to write the music for the adverts in the great British Gas share sell-off. In 1986 Arthur Russell released "Schoolbells" under the name Indian Ocean and "Let's Go Swimming" under his own name. Both dance records of outstanding if warped pedigree. "Schoolbells" was the follow up to "Go Bang" and features similar jazz-inflected texture while "Let's Go Swimming" was more song-orientated with unidentified sonic objects flitting in and out of the mix and an accumulating sense of kinetics that threatens to collapse in upon itself.

Back in 1983, the year of Meredith Monk's "The Games", an avant-garde theatrical musical happening. In 1983, Arthur Russell released Tower Of Meaning, definitely a non-dance album, full of richly romantic textures and conducted by Julius Eastman.

1980 was the year in which ambient music composer Max Neuhaus installed 64 little loudspeakers around the base of the glass domo of the Como Park Observatory in St. Paul, Minnesota, so that visitors could supplement their appreciation of exotic vegetable forms below with relaxing, sustained electronic tones. In 1980 Arthur Russell released "Is It All Over My Face" under the name Loose Joints on the West End label. The A-side, with the female vocal and mixed by Larry Levan, became a classic of "garage" dance music and was played to death at the Paradise Garage.

And in 1987? "Wax The Van" and the album World Of Echo, the latter containing versions of previous Russell songs like "Schoolbells", "Wax The Van", "Let's Go Swimming", but warped into a completely different dimension with only Russell's voice, cello, a smattering of percussion and huge washes of echo for comfort. Mournful, mysterious, intimate, understated, indeterminate and altogether beautiful. Aworld of music beyond notes.

THE CULTIVATED AND THE VERNACULAR

One way of looking at the history of American music is to see it as a dialogue between the cultivated and the vernacular. For much of that history, the upholders of so-called "serious" American music sought to suppress the vernacular side in deference to European-derived models what music should be. In the Sixties that separation between serious and vernacular music started to break down with composers like Cage and Reich who looked to Oriental and African musics for inspiration. This Euro-centrism was further broken down with the rediscovery of indigenous American folk music by the classical avant-garde contingent.

Though from a contemporary classical background, Arthur Russell cites folk musicians like Estil C. Ball, who played a sort of west Virginia backwoods hillbilly music, Malvina Reynolds, who wrote "Morning Town Ride" and "Little Boxes" which was later made famous by Pete Seeger, and Fred McDowell as key influences.
This folk influence can be heard on World Of Echo, especially in Russell's vocal style that has been compared to both joni Mitchell and John Martyn. Though exhibiting a folk influence World Of Echo is unlikely to appeal to Hedgehog Pie fans, being a music with its roots in the ether rather than in some romanticised peasant-tilled earth.
Russell tells a story which perfectly illustrates the reason for his interest in the vernacular. While at the Manhattan School Of Music, he took classes in linguisyics at the University of Columbia next door.

Arthur: "At school the courses I liked most were the linguistics courses. The professors spoke so many languages and were so articulate. They fought these fierce battles among themselves.

"I remember one day saying to one of the professors: 'Don't you think it matters what it is you're trying to say' He replied 'That's the tritest thing I've ever heard.' But I wasn't sorry I said it. It seems to me that what you mean informs a change in the structure of language. The intention of communication is the formative force in language."

What Russell is getting at is that linguistics is more interested in establishing the structure of language that makes speech possible rather than investigating what people actually say.

Russell, on the other hand, sees language in terms of a practice rather than an object as a movement in time rather than an object in space. Since music is a language, the same thing applies. Hence Russell's interest in the vernacular music(the way people actually speak music whether it's through folk or the dancefloor) rather than the formal rules of making music that classical music is taken up with.

As Russell well knows, the musical language that people speak has little to do with the language taught in the music academies.

REPETITION IN OUR MUSIC AND WE?fRE NEVER GONNA LOSE IT

"Disco music was strongly influenced by repetitive music. The appearance of the minimalists like myself in the pop circles contributed to this trend. Although pop musicians based themselves on us, they still created their own forms. Their musical language was expanded." - Philip Glass.

"The Sixties were characterised by a tremendous gap between the classically trained avant-garde composer and the pop musician. The Sixties seem to be fusing them. While Bob Dylan at the time had nothing to do with John Cage, there is now a thread running through the work of John Cage, Talking Heads, Laurie Anderson and my own that used to be inconceivable." Philip Glass again.

For centuries, repetition was regarded as taboo in "serious" music circles. In the Sixties and Seventies, minimalist composers like Philip Glass, Steve reich and Terry Riley overturned this taboo and opened up the possibility of a dialogue with more popular forms of music that had always used repetition as a key element.

Even today, though, repetition still gets a bad rap. Chicago House music is most often criticised by rock writers for its monotony, its use of endlessly repeated synth lines for its base.

Even when such critics rightly isolate the hypnotic, trance-inducing momentum of repetitive pop, they wrongly ascribe to this an escapist function; the out-of-head, out-of-body experience that such music engenders being a form of flight from reality and politics.
Arthur Russell, much of whose work is repetitive and who is often asked "Why can't you have a beginning, middle and an end??h remembers playing a Hamilton Bohannon record to an Italian friend. His friend was unimpressed by the enchanted sound of Bohannon's undulating, sinuous and fiercely repetitive groove format, a sound that I regard as the foundling moment of the nation of disco whose influence can be heard most explicitly in Talking Heads as well as dozens of other dance acts who've probably never even heard of the great man.
Arthur: "When the track had finished he turned to me and said 'This is second-rate music.' That was such a weird thing to say. I'd never thought of it n those hierarchical terms. It always seems important to meto avoid such value judgments."

Arthur also remembers one time while at the Manhattan School Of Music, when he played his latest composition "City Park" ( a repetitive piece that included readings by Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein and was intended for Columbia University's highly repected WKCR radio station),to his composition teacher, Charles Wuorinen (a leading exponent of sophisticated European-derived classical music "the type of music that had beginnings, middles and ends in abundance" according to Arthur).

Arthur: "I said to him the thing that excited me about the piece was that you could pick up the needle anywhere and put it down and it always sounded the same. Not exactly the same, but you could plug into it for as long as you liked, then plug out and then plug back in again without losing anything essential unlike narrative music where your attention is required from beginning to end. He turned to me and said , 'That's the most unattractive thing I've ever heard."

Russell makes an apology with the work of filmmaker Phil Niblock, for whom Arthur recorded "Answer Me" on the World Of Echo album.

"His films are very long. They go on for eight hours at a time. He makes a point of encouraging people to get up and move around during his films. It's very exciting."

Another more obvious analogy is with club music, where the seamless beat context created by the DJ is there to be dipped in and out of at will, rather than demanding the rapt and constant attention that a rock performance demands. What we're talking about here is the distinction between music as process (most dance music as well as Glass, Reich,etc.) and music as object (U2, The smiths, Simple Minds, etc.). But Russell is wary of making the fit between the contemporary avant-garde and the dancefloor too neat.

Arthur: "I think the kind of repetition that comes out of me and is in dance music is somewhat different to the repetition of minimalist works of the sixties and seventies.

"Dance music is more improvisatory. It uses an extendable strucure which on the one hand is recognizable, and on the other, improvisatory. It's based on hearing what you do while you do it. In most compositions, it's based on hearing things in a much more distanced sense.

"Indian music is a different form of repetition again. You sit down and listen to it all the way through, and it goes into you and builds up into a total effect. African music is different again. You get the sense that the repetition is a social thing that expresses not an individual consciousness but a community."

ANOTHER WORLD OF ECHO

ARTHUR: World Of Echo isn't a complete version of echo, it's a sketch version of echo. I want to do the full version which will have brass bands and orchestras playing outdoors in parks with those band-stands that project echo. I also want to have Casio keyboards on sailboats. Have you ever been on a sailboat? It's so quiet, all you hear is wind and sea."